The national non-domestic rate was introduced in 1990 to replace a system of locally varying business rates which had lasted for almost four centuries. Five years after the. 1990 reforms, this report evaluates the operation of the present system and discusses various options for reform.

In this Commentary, the authors look at the likely effects that real year-by-year increases in road fuel duties will have on the use of cars by households and on their economic welfare, with particular attention to the distributional consequences.

How and why has the way in which the average British family spends its money changed over the past 25 years? Those are the key questions examined in this report, using data from the UK FES between 1975 and 1999. It looks not only at broad changes in total spending, but also at how the division...